Halogen Place Matrix services have been discontinued.
In brief, the hypervisor seems to have gone down some time in June. I have no visibility into why; both out-of-band management and shell access are unavailable to me, and my colocation provider has not offered any statements about the downtime. My last contact with them was on July 14th, 2026, where they indicated they would get the server back online that day. Since then the service has not come back online and I've received no communication.
Some of you may remember earlier communications about potential downtime as part of moving away from this provider around July 2025. This was called off; after some renewed communication, and a survey of alternative options for hosting the service, I decided to stick with the existing colocation arrangement.
A year down the road, the state of provider contact is in worse place than last year. The server is down instead this time, I have received one, terse reply to my inquiry about downtime, and the phone line is dead. Tickets are not being responded to or actioned, and I seemingly only got a response because I sent an email over directly to the business owner. This situation is untenable, and it suffices to say that I can't continue to pay for a service that is no longer being provided.
Probably not. While database and VM backups exist, I no longer have interest in hosting a large multi-user Matrix homeserver. This is not a new statement for those of you that have seen the discourse in the General Discussion; I voiced a bit about my increasing disengagement with ecosystem and community there. In the time since, this hasn't really improved, and I have to acknowledge here that I'd like to put my time and resources elsewhere. To continue to host the service given my continued disinterest was and is irresponsible.
With that in mind, I apologize that discontinuing this service has happened so abruptly. Last year I had the opportunity to take a canary in the coal mine (the provider situation) seriously, and put plans to gracefully wind down this service in motion. I didn't; in 2025, I still felt hesitant to pull the plug and felt I could keep things going in a "maintenance mode" assuming nothing worse happened. At this interval, I realize that was the wrong read of the situation.
Domain registration expiries will inevitably make the domains available again to register, potentially allowing for a fresh relaunch of Matrix services via those domains, but I have no intentions at this time to transfer the host box or backups for Halogen Place to another person or entity at this time.
At this time, please consider creating a new Matrix account with another homeserver provider, if you had not already done so in 2025. You may also consider hosting your own homeserver utilizing a lightweight Matrix homeserver software.
This data will be retained while "Halogen" domains are still actively registered. Upon their expiry, this data will be destroyed; backups will be deleted, drives will be zeroed out, and then the host box will be handed off to a local e-waste service provider. Any communications, correspondences, and media should survive solely in a federated context; any "local-only" communications and content will be destroyed.
I am in good health at this time.
With that said and done, I bid you all adieu.